As you may already be aware, the Linear Tape Open Consortium made LTO-6 tape technology available to the market in the latter part of 2012. Defying the ridiculous claims by data storage experts that tape would be dead by now, the LTO community was thrilled at what they had accomplished with the LTO-6.
To give you an idea of their accomplishments, we will outline a handful of facts you should know about the impressive technology:
• LTO-6 holds up to 6.25TB of compressed data. Wildly enough, the medium’s capacity has more than doubled and its throughput boosted by more than 40 percent. This is excellent news for organizations wanting to keep their tape storage costs down, while accommodating massive amounts of data.
• LTO-6 Drives Offer 400MBps Performance. This means that it uses a 2.5:1 compression ratio and allows for up to 1.4TB of data transferred per hour. Now data management is much easier and time effective.
• Industry leading brands now ship LTO-6. Organizations with major data storage systems can rely on HP, IBM, Quantum, Fujifilm, Hitachi, Maxell, Imation, Sony, and TDK for their LTO-6 products. These brands understand the true value of tape and are committed to making it readily available to the world.
• LTO-6 includes encryption and WORM. These features were also offered in LTO-3, LTO-4, and LTO-5. Encryption helps secure important data, while WORM allows for organizations to store data in a non-rewritable format. They both help organizations meet compliance regulations as set forth by the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SOX, and more.
• LTO-6 Includes Partitioning Functionality, also known as LTFS. The Linear Tape File System is much of the reason data storage experts are eating their previous words that went something like “tape is dead.” Now it is possible to drag and drop files, which makes tape work in a very similar manner as a removable disk drive.
On a daily basis our team is asked by organizations to help them make cost-effective choices for their data storage infrastructures. We can’t be more thrilled with the LTO Consortium and the technologies they have made available in the recent months and years. Not only is LTO-6 impressive from a technical standpoint, it is very durable and can last for 30 or more years.
It has been said time and time again that “the steady horse wins the race.” In our minds, tape is the steady and reliable horse for safely storing data for decades to come.